October 27, 2006
A Heap of Computer Scientists
Continuing my academic genealogies, here is a PDF map of computer scientists, based on the TCS genealogy by David S. Johnson and Ian Parberry.
Several of the Usual Suspects show up - Alonzo Church, Alfred Tarski and the tree of mathematicians around David Hilbert. So this graph links to the philosophy and math graphs. The node degree distributions look similar too - a power law, of course.
I'm starting to develop a theory for this kind of graph, it might turn into a paper yet. Unlike other social networks the topology is nearly strictly a tree, and the growth process might not be well modelled by preferential attachment (but I'm still experimenting) since each philosopher is active within only a particular lifetime. This time aspect is interesting since it is normally lacking or hidden in social network graphs, but here the tree structure makes it clearer.